Menu

Kayla Freeman

About Kayla Freeman

Posts by :

Embracing Discomfort in Research

/ /

Embracing Discomfort in Research

Trying to write and theorize about a culture other than my own is difficult.  It makes me feel uncomfortable; I have put off writing this post for days. I think some of this hesitancy comes from not wanting to say the wrong thing, not wanting to be wrong, and most importantly, not wanting to offend.  I had a conversation with Jane Kenway while she was visiting about whether Australia is a part of the Global South, forgetting, or not knowing, that with that label comes an association with third world countries that does not make sense to put on Australia.  I left this conversation feeling uncomfortable and naive, although these are the conversations that I need to be having to understand the culture I am studying the best I can, just as anyone beginning research on a new culture needs to begin by doing.

While writing my paper about femininity in an elite schooling environment in Australia, my first instinct was to draw on the feminist theory and gender theory of education that I have learned in previous classes.  This information is a good foundation to base my argument on, but after Adam suggested that I read Raewyn Connell’s work, I realized that I need to be more careful with my assumptions that our theory from the US and UK (which is almost entirely the range of the work that I have studied in the past) applies to the situations that I am discussing in Australia.  To remedy this problem, I have made the decision to only use the works of Australian authors to theorize the significance of the data that I discuss in my paper.

I have found a problem with even this approach, however, because in this, I am making assumptions, based on the Global Northern theory that I have learned and read, about what is significant to theorize about in my paper.  At Adam’s suggestion, I have taken measures to reflect about whether there were parts of my analysis that I was missing, and I have found a few places where I needed to consider Australian culture to get a full understanding of what was happening (some of which should have been more obvious to me, but since I know little about Australian history, I never would have made the connections without reading a book about Australian culture).  While reading Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory, I found a description of the ‘White Australia’ policy that was enforced until the 1960s that did not allow people to immigrate from Asia to Australia.  This provided strong historical roots for the Asian racism that I saw in the data and was trying to contextualize in relevant gender theory. It strengthened my argument, and I gave myself a pat on the back for figuring this out.

I was then reading Raewyn Connell’s Gender in the World Perspective, and in it, I found a single line about the local history of drag culture in Australia. Since a large part of my argument is fixed in the comparison between Everdeen and Hillford, the school in the mockumentary Ja’ime King: Private School Girl in which Chris Lilley plays Ja’ime in drag, I yet again found a potential aspect of Australian culture that would make the Australian students understand the show differently than I do because of nuances in Australian culture that I do not understand.  I found resources on the history of drag in Australia and found a wealth of information about how it has been used as a political tool to call attention to problems in the society by making a joke of the issue rather than creating an anger-filled argument. Yet again, this only strengthened my argument, and I gave myself a pat on the back for figuring this out.

But should I have been celebrating the fact that I learned these things about the culture that I was researching? Shouldn’t it be a given that I spend time to understand the place that I am researching instead of just the topic? Isn’t that my responsibility as a researcher?  Raewyn Connell argues that many people have tried to apply gender theory of the metropoles in the Global North to places where it does not necessarily apply. Her arguments made me realize that a lot of the ways that I was trying to understand my research needed to change: I shouldn’t approach it as looking for the finite set of ways that Australian culture is different from the US culture that I understand and that Everdeen is different than the public US high school that I attended, but instead first recognize that I can never say that I understand Australian culture and second learn as much as I can to be as equipped as possible to write about the culture in Australia and the culture with the walls of Everdeen, even if it requires some discomfort along the way.

Improving Interview Practices

/ /

Improving Interview Practices

As part of my research for the semester, I am interviewing alums from Everdeen, the Australian school, to have an opportunity to collect information regarding the intersection of gender and education under the Parallel Education model.  While I work out the logistics of finding people willing to be interviewed, I have been reading through the transcripts of past interviews with Colby students and students from Everdeen.  These interviews have made me reflect on interview practices and how I can improve my technique before participating in the interview process.   

While reading through the transcriptions, a question made me pause:

Colby Student: Who’s your favorite teacher? Tell me a little bit about him.

The second sentence, when she said “Tell me about him” concerned me.  The girl who was being interviewed proceeded to tell a story about a man.  It is impossible to know whether her answer would have been the same if the question was phrased without a gendered pronoun, but using gendered pronouns predisposes the interview participant to think about a person of the indicated gender and then respond in that manner. 

This question propelled me to reflect on interview practices: namely, the way that interviewer’s questions and responses to an interview participant can influence the data collected and even the interview participant’s construction of self.  In doing this reflection, I am not trying to insult interviewers of the past, but instead raise awareness of where limitations of the interview data may lie, while also improving my skills for when the time comes for me to interview Everdeen alums.

A pattern emerged in the interviews: Colby students often phrased questions in a way that predisposed the Everdeen students to answer in a certain way.  The use of a gendered pronoun above was an example of this, but it also appears in other ways; for example,

Colby Student: …can you tell me a story of when you learned something valuable in school, whether it was, like, a math lesson or a social lesson?

Everdeen Student: Um, I think it was probably maths and we had to divide and multiply.

All four interview participants were asked about a time when they learned something valuable in school, although none of the other interviewers gave the options above.  While all of the other students answered in a more thoughtful, introspective way, this student latched on to one of the options provided for him and responded with what is a rather shallow answer to this question.  This made me reflect on the fact that giving more open-ended questions and allowing the students to think before providing them with some information leading towards the answer that I as an interviewer am seeking can inspire more honest and insightful answers from interview participants.

I additionally found a tendency of interviewers to perpetuate negative societal norms in the way that they phrase their interview questions or respond to interview subjects.  In an interview with a Colby student and a girl from Everdeen, I found the following example:

Colby Student: Um, do you have a boyfriend or anything? Are you allowed to date? What’s dating like there?

This question perpetuates heteronormative standards, which is already a problem at Everdeen where the students are placed in single-gender classes under the heteronormative assumption that this will eliminate distractions from sexual tension. This question could impress on the girl who is being interviewed that the world is expecting her to date a boy. In the event that the girl is gay or questioning her sexuality, this type of question could make it even harder for her to come out to herself and others.

In addition to these problematic examples, I also found examples where Colby students did an excellent job giving broad questions and then prompting students to give in-depth, meaningful answers. For example,

Colby Student: Yah. What makes [your teachers] great?

Everdeen Student: Um, different things.

Colby Student: Yah?

Everdeen Student: So my maths teacher…

The Everdeen student then launched into a paragraph-long explanation about why his teachers are so great.  Since the Colby student did not simply accept his first vague answer and move on to the next question but instead used an active listening technique to show that she is interested and wanted to know more, the interviewer captured more detailed and interesting information.

 

Based on the examples above, I think it is important to reflect on how interview practices have implications both on the interview subjects and on the data collected.  My goals for when I interview Everdeen alums are to use open-ended questions, to give the students time to answer before I jump in with suggestions, and to prompt the students for more details if necessary.  I will also try to limit my assumptions about gender and sexuality and do more research about how to limit the prejudices that I bring into research interview scenarios.  This reflecting will make me a much better interviewer, both for the sake of the interview participants and the research